Trail of Greed: Fighting Fraud and Corruption... A Dangerous Game (12 page)

I went back in after ten minutes to see how Sophie and Pierre were getting on.

“OK you geniuses, where are we?”

Pierre pointed to the screen. “We’ve got a spreadsheet for each fund, listing all the investors and all their details. We can sort them by any characteristic you want. Watch.”

He called up a menu screen, made a few selections and the whole list sorted itself out into ascending reported rate of return for 2011. All the other characteristics automatically sorted themselves out as well. Hey, presto! All the people in the low percentages had comments indicating that there was little chance of complaints – dementia, deceased, estate awaiting probate, etc. Down at the bottom were all the ‘careful’, ex-bankers and the like. They had the best returns.

“Pierre, there’s your proof if ever you need it. This guy should go to jail.”

“I fully agree, but I don’t want Sophie to go to jail as well,” he replied.

“What do you mean?” “What Sophie has done is highly illegal. We can’t use this stuff. She‘d get arrested immediately. We can’t publish it either or we’d get sued for millions.”

“Well we have to do something,” I retorted. “We can’t let this bastard get away with this. Let me have a think about it. Can you find out what they really did with these funds and how much they were actually making? If we can get a rough fix on that, then deduct what they have paid out, we’ll get an idea of the difference.”

“Sure, but it’ll take us a couple of days.” “How about getting it worked out by Monday?” Pierre looked at Sophie who nodded. “Let’s get on with it then,” he said. Pierre was right, I realised. We had proof but we had no usable proof. We couldn’t even run the risk of showing this to any of the investors. They would be mad as hell and wouldn’t be able to keep quiet about the source of their information. I imagined what Alice would do if I showed her this. She’d probably write to her MP and then we’d be in trouble.

I swiftly came to the conclusion that we were going to need some kind of plan which had nothing to do with the law of the land but which would scupper Purdy and his gang of thieves. The thought of acting outside the law didn’t bother me one bit. I considered it a perk of old age.

I needed to think up something and I also needed Pierre and Mike to agree with it. Mike was still in Edinburgh but had promised to report back here on Sunday.

It could wait until then.

Mike arrived mid-morning and I updated him on the results of Sophie’s hacking and yesterday’s afternoon of digging. He was as disgusted as we were about what was going on and agreed that something had to be done.

He told me what had been going on in Edinburgh. Purdy had had another lunch with Gavin Reid, the slimy lawyer, and they had identified the squash partner.

“It turns out that Bill Dewar is a Scottish MP. He represents an outlying Edinburgh constituency and is a Scottish Nationalist. Used to be Labour but changed his allegiance about five years ago.

“He lives in a terraced house on the outskirts of Linlithgow. I found someone who knows him and got him talking. He didn’t think much of him. He used to be a trade unionist and seems to have spent most of his career trying to climb up the political ladder using whatever means that happened to be useful at the time. His Dad was a miner and he left school at fifteen – not that there is anything wrong with that as such – but if he was a waster when he was young he apparently hasn’t improved, according to my source. I’ve left Doug to follow him around for a few days and report back.”

At that point the phone rang. “That’ll be Doug,” said Mike and went to answer it, explaining that he’d given my number to him in case he had any news.

I could hear a voice on the other end of the line but couldn’t make out what was being said. Mike’s face had a look of astonishment painted on it.

“What in the hell are you doing in Alicante?” he said, with an air of disbelief.

He listened for a few minutes and then told Doug to dig for as much information as he could find and then follow the guy back. “Give me a call when you get back.” He hung up.

“That was Doug,” he said as he sat down again. “Apparently our ex-Labour, SNP MP flew out to Alicante yesterday evening. Doug managed to buy a ticket and get on the same plane. He was picked up at the airport by a woman driving a Porsche. Doug managed to get a taxi and he followed them to a bloody great villa not far out of town on the cliffs overlooking the Med. According to Doug the place looks as if it’s worth a few million. As you heard, I told him to keep digging and report back when he returned.”

“So we’ve now got a fraudster running an investment company who plays squash twice a week with an MP who lives in a terraced house in Linlithgow and goes out to Spain on a Friday night to stay in a multimillion pound villa . . .”

Mike broke in. “He only took a small bag as hand luggage, by the way.”

“. . . and a slimy-looking lawyer that he seems to have lunch with a couple of times a week.”

“And our fraudster has a mistress.” “And he’s prepared to do a bit of burglary,” I added. “Do you think that Purdy, for some reason or another, is passing some of the money to Dewar who is stashing it away in Spain?”

“Could be, but I can’t think why.” “Perhaps Dewar knows about the girlfriend and is blackmailing him,” suggested Mike.

“Possible. If that house is Dewar’s the money must have come from somewhere.”

“And our lawyer friend?”

“Don’t know.” We gave up surmising and I told him that Pierre and Sophie had gone back to the hotel and would be working on the files. We were invited to go round and eat with them later.

Mike got up. “I’ll go round now and see how they’re getting on,” and headed for the door.

“Tell them I’ll be around about half past seven,” I called at his retreating back. He replied with something that I didn’t catch, got into his car and roared off.

I drove across to the hotel, arriving there at the appointed hour and went into the bar. I found Pierre on his own at a table in the corner.

“Where’s Sophie? And Mike? He said he was coming over.”

“He did,” replied Pierre with a smile and a small shake of the head. “He arrived about an hour ago, decided that we were working Sophie much too hard and promptly took her off to dinner somewhere else.”

“Oh, God. Typical. He can’t keep away from them.” “She seemed quite keen on the idea. Asked me if I minded. I told her to go ahead. It was nothing to do with me.”

“Well she’s certainly a cut above his usual,” I said “I hope she knows what she’s doing. He’s going to be sixty in a year and a half.”

“So what? Didn’t you still feel quite young when you were fifty-eight?”

I thought back and smiled to myself at a few memories. “And perhaps she makes him feel five years younger? That would make him fifty-three. Sophie’s just turned forty-four. So where’s the problem?”

“Looks like it’s just you and me then. Let’s go and eat and decide what we’re going to do about our Mr Purdy.”

A Tournedos Rossini, a bottle of Nuits St Georges and a malt with our coffee did wonders for my feeling of wellbeing. We had a complicated picture that was emerging and neither of us knew where it was leading, nor what we were going to do about it, so we just chatted and enjoyed each other’s company.

I heard more about Pierre’s upbringing in France after the war, about how he had started his company and how it had grown over the years. I filled in more of the story of our family which he absorbed with eagerness. There was no rancour or bitterness in him. He told me that there had been times when he was young when he’d felt it hard not knowing who his father was but he had become much more philosophical about as he got older. He had made a success of his life in spite of the difficult beginnings and, when he eventually found out the truth, he felt no hard feelings towards Dad, who had, after all, known absolutely nothing about his existence.

He confessed to being genuinely delighted to have found us and was looking forward to his later years being much more fulfilling than he had imagined that they might be.

Mike and Sophie arrived back about eleven o’clock and joined us for coffee. They seemed to have become very comfortable in each other’s company. Mike was being quite the gentleman and Sophie’s warmth of reaction and the easy banter between them made me glance at Pierre with upraised eyebrows. He answered with a smile and a Gallic shrug. Neither Mike nor Sophie noticed our exchange. They were much too interested in each other.

“Time to go,” I announced when we had finished our coffee. “Pierre and Sophie have got work to do tomorrow.”

Sophie turned to Pierre and asked him something in French which I couldn’t follow. There was a bit of gesticulating of hands and a questioning expression on Sophie’s face. Pierre raised his eyebrows for a moment, asked another question and got his answer. It seemed to me that she was trying to persuade him into something but I had no idea what it was.

Mike meanwhile had turned to me. “Mind if I stay the night, Bob?” he asked me. “My pleasure. Are you going back to Edinburgh tomorrow?”

“Well, no actually. I’m taking the day off.” Pierre then spoke. “And so is Sophie, apparently,” he said to me. I looked from one to the other, puzzled.

“I’m taking Sophie to see a bit of Scotland. We’re going up to Loch Tay. All she’s seen so far is Letham which is not exactly the only part of the country worth seeing.”

“What about the analysis we need done?” “I’ll take care of that,” said Pierre “I should be able to get through it all tomorrow. Let the young ones have a tourist day if they want.”

They both looked slightly embarrassed. I didn’t know Sophie that well yet but I did know my brother. This was definitely a different Mike from the one I was used to.

Pierre and I got up to go. Mike and Sophie exchanged a word or two. We all said our “goodnights” and Mike and I set off home.

No sooner were we in the car than Mike looked across at me with a grin.

“No bloody comments from you about photograph collections. Right?”

“I wouldn’t dare. Let’s go.” I was actually secretly quite glad about the way things were turning out, although I wasn’t going to admit it yet. It smelled very much as if Mike had fallen for this delightful Frenchwoman and, hopefully, she for him. I let these thoughts occupy me on the short drive home and avoided making any humorous remarks. Getting on the wrong side of Mike can be dangerous sometimes.

Mike set off the next morning and I decided to get stuck into the information that we had extracted from the AIM files. I fired in the CD and started scrolling through the files, checking the information with the spreadsheet that Sophie had generated. When I was satisfied that everything seemed to have been picked up I closed down all the detailed files and started to concentrate on the spreadsheet. It was much easier to comprehend what had been going on.

I had a file for each of the three funds. Each contained between two hundred and fifty and three hundred names. There were about twenty columns for each name, finishing with the column which contained the comments. I immediately made a copy of each one to work with and closed down the originals.

Where to start? They were, at the moment, ranked by ascending rate of return so that the poor investors who had received the smallest returns were at the top. There were exceptions, but generally speaking you could see that all the widows over seventy were up in the top third.

Down in the bottom third I found the profiles where the husband and wife were both still alive. They tended to be younger and often the husband had been a banker or an accountant or a lawyer – the type of people who would have a better understanding of numbers. And presumably the fact that both spouses were still alive multiplied the chances of suspicion.

I was totally disgusted at the callousness of the scheme. If you were a widow, eighty-five years old and had been in a retirement home for the last four years, there you were in the top quartile. If you had had a job which had needed an understanding of figures, there you were down near the bottom, coded “careful”. At what point you were moved up the rankings to “normal” or then up to “no problem” I hated to think. The whole scheme was cynical in the extreme.

The commentary box noted dates of death of spouses and dates of going into homes. “No children” moved you up the ranks, presumably because there wouldn’t be anyone to complain after you’d gone. There were even a few dates shown where someone had been diagnosed with dementia. They must have a staff of people tracking the personal circumstances of each of their investors.

I looked for Alice. She was ranked in the normal section. I found Pierre around the middle as well, presumably because he was French. There were a few foreign names, but not many. They were all in the normal section. My guess was that they would be more difficult to track. All in all it was a picture of utter greed.

The next question was to estimate the differential between what this money had really earned and the amount Purdy had grudgingly passed on to his investors. That would have to wait until Pierre had finished his work.

Whatever the amount was I had proof, right in front of me, of the fraud.

I took a break and rustled up a cup of coffee. I’d been looking at these numbers for a couple of hours and the old eyes needed a rest.

I thought things over for five minutes. Purdy knew I was suspicious. He must do because it could only be he who had organized the burglary of the house.

We couldn’t use this information because we had obtained it illegally. How could we obtain information legally that perhaps we could use? I had asked Alice to write to AIM and she was going to give me a copy of the reply. Could I get others to do the same? Purdy would be suspicious if he suddenly got a dozen similar letters from a dozen people querying the management of their money, but maybe that was a good idea. We wanted to rattle him and make him realise that people were getting suspicious. He then might make a mistake and give us information that we needed. Or he might even stop his whole scheme, realising that it was getting dangerous. That he was close to getting discovered.